Shandy

Want to make a shandy any ideas or rules I should follow???

It's a cocktail, there are no rules.

Brew a beer low in hop, malt, and yeast character. Mix you're preferred portion of citrus drink, ginger drink, whatever you choose. Keg together and enjoy.

Can you bottle it???

I think bottling would be tough because of preservatives in the mix & and the yeast would consume the available sugars and change the profile of the shandy. Killing the yeast and force carbing would be about it.

When I was at the Deschutes brewpub in Portland last summer, they had something called a radler on tap. I think that it's a summer drink in northern Europe of lager and European lemonade.

I don't know how they mixed the two - whether at the bar or in the keg. Might be worth an e-mail to Deschutes. From what I've heard, they're pretty good about answering questions.

Run3minman said:

Can you bottle it???

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Only if you use sugar substitute in the non beer part aka something like splenda

Beer + lemonade = shandy

Or is there some secret shandy that us Europeans don't know about?

Nugent said:

When I was at the Deschutes brewpub in Portland last summer, they had something called a radler on tap. I think that it's a summer drink in northern Europe of lager and European lemonade.

I don't know how they mixed the two - whether at the bar or in the keg. Might be worth an e-mail to Deschutes. From what I've heard, they're pretty good about answering questions.

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Thats on the menu in various pubs here. Its basically half beer (whatever is on tap) + half 7up. Mixed by topping draft beer up with lemonade, nothing fancy.

BadMrFrosty said:

Thats on the menu in various pubs here. Its basically half beer (whatever is on tap) + half 7up. Mixed by topping draft beer up with lemonade, nothing fancy.

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Gotcha. They were really good, especially on a hot day with lunch.

I bought some last summer that was bottled, personally didn't like it one bit but that's the beauty of homebrewing, make whatever you like.

Point of fact: "lemonade" means different things in different parts of the world. In shandy, it's normally a carbonated, sweetened lemon beverage, right?

When we make shandy at our house, we get pretty fancy on the lemon soda side of things (I'm drawing a blank on the brand name right now), but the beer normally ends up being some unremarkable imported pilsner.

Yes I forgot most people here are from the USA. Here is what I used to do:

Get hold of some sort of lager and fill a pint glass half way.

Get some sort of citrus carbonated beverage and fill the glass to the top.

Drink and enjoy

Notes:

I found that beers that were slightly hoppier in flavour worked best when mixed with the acidic flavour of the soda.

Grapefruit flavoured soda works very well, lemon works very well, lime works great (which is also another classic English beer mixer called, you guessed it, lager and lime). I tried other flavours but did not like the results.

Make sure you use a decent quality soda as the cheaper ones do not have enough flavour so they will just water down your beer without adding much. With these you could try 4:1 beer to soda but I never was really happy with the result.

Anyway, I don't drink much shandy anymore as soft drinks cost almost twice the price of a beer here and the alcohol free beer is pretty good when the occasion calls for it

unionrdr said:

It was originally made by a German brewer about 10 miles outside Munich when his light beer stash was running low. But he had a lot of this lemon soda that's supposed to be popular in Germany,so he mixed them. My recipe is close to Lienenkugel's with a slight unique twist. I'll leave it at that.

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Where is your recipe at? Would you mind sharing it?